There were a lot of people around. We filmed in an ice cream place in the Village. I guess this is the first interesting thing that ever happened there because the owner is already overflowing with plans to paper the walls with blowups of the scene and proclaim to the world that Different Strokes was filmed there. I don’t know why that should bring people in off the street for a dish of pistachio ice cream, but then I’m not the world’s best intuitive businessman. At any rate, we got a hell of a lot of cooperation.
It’s interesting to watch people react to filmmaking. It took a while to shoot that scene, but nobody left in its course. Everybody seemed to find the whole process fascinating. I guess film is still a very mysterious and glamorous thing to most people. The studios may have fallen apart, the star system may indeed be dead and gone, but the melody lingers on. Film seems to have a reality for the multitudes that reality itself lacks.
Damn, Wells, don’t that sound profound! I wonder does it mean anything...
We shot the scene in Pluto’s office over at Dell, where they had an office that was small and cheerless enough. It’s basically a storage room but we unstored some cartons and moved in a desk and piled tons of garbage on it. The problem was getting a telephone. There was no phone in the room, and the suggestion that we rip somebody else’s phone out of the wall and put it back when we were done with it was not well received. A couple of blocks away there’s a firm that sells telephones, so we borrowed one from them and took it back when we were done. They let us use it free in return for a credit line which I don’t think we are going to give them. I can see doing it for the Pleasure Chest, but wasting a credit line to save having to spend ten dollars on a telephone is a little ridiculous.
Dell just moved into new offices a few months ago, and one of the editors said it was a shame we hadn’t been able to film the scene before the move. “My office was smaller than this,” he said, “and windowless, and more cluttered, and there was a phone in it. I couldn’t always find it but I would hear it ringing and rummage around for it. It had more of a feeling of Hell, too. This place is Hell, too, but you have to spend a lot of time here before you realize it.”
The Dell people all promised to show for the cabaret scene tomorrow.
Alan came up with a fairly good idea. We’ve got all these people set for the cabaret sequence tomorrow, all these bodies for the audience, and he suggested we try to do the auction sequence at the same time while we have all those bodies on tap. The only problem is time. The cabaret sequence is, in many respects, the hardest one to film. There’s a lot happening and for it to work there has to be a lot of cutting back and forth between the stage and the audience reactions. He and Vinnie went into a huddle to discuss it. What we did agree was that we would certainly do the cabaret stuff first, because an audience is more important there than in the auction sequence. We can just pull in people off the streets for the auction bit, as all you have to see is their backs anyway.
This evening we shot my favorite scene, the singles bar shtick in which Pluto transforms Sophie into a giant stuffed panda, among other things, and finally into her young and beautiful self. We filmed it at an East Side place, one of the ones we see them entering in the outdoor series in which they do the town. We already filmed them entering and leaving the goddamned place, so now we were ready to show what happened in between.
This necessitated Sophie’s return to old-lady makeup, and there was a certain amount of concern that she didn’t look exactly the way she had looked previously. I couldn’t see any difference. I suppose we should have shot a Polaroid of her before for comparison. This is something nobody thought of at the time, of course. And another of the many things I have learned in the course of filming this work of art.
The scene was slow to film because of all the changes. The special effects were hardly difficult. The touch of a Yakima Canutt was not required, that is to say. Pluto would snap his fingers, we would cut, then Sophie would leave the chair and we would substitute the panda bear, and so on and so forth for quite a while.
One element that slowed things up was the other people in the bar. They had come there to drink and chase pussy, and they were not as cooperative as the yoyos at the ice cream parlor. Their cooperation was particularly needed, too, in that we used a lot of long shots during the transformation routine. Our solution, finally, was to film the whole thing silent and dub crowd noises in later, as some wiseass always spoke up at the wrong moment when we tried to do it all at once.
I did a little ad-libbing of my own. The bartender is a huge spade with a shaved head and a gold earring, that number, and I couldn’t see passing him up. He thought it would be sensational to be in a film, so he’s one of the things Sophie is transformed into and out of in the middle of the sequence. Since he also shows up in his official capacity as bartender, it should make for an interesting bit.
We cleverly waited until the bar closed to finish the scene, because we didn’t dare have Sophie emerge young and beautiful and stark naked in the midst of that crowd of horny superannuated preppies. Not unless we were willing to improvise a gangbang sequence, which is what might well have happened. Incidentally, nobody but the owner, who okayed all this because he has money in the film, knows that the picture is pornographic. We explained it was an underground film full of symbolism and Satanism and like that. God knows what they thought of it all.
Sometime after three they closed the club and Sophie bared her bod for all to see. Then Pluto snapped his fingers and we cut and she put on her young-style clothes and we filmed some more, and finally we were all done, thank the Great God Jehovah, and I came back here and wrote this.
The fucking sun is coming up and I’m still sitting here typing. I’m going to have about two hours sleep before it’s time to face the cameras again. I’d love to take the day off, but it promises to be the most hectic day of all, and I have to be there.
— Wednesday
Sorry, folks. I can’t hack it.
I don’t think I’ve ever been this exhausted before, which is interesting in view of the fact that I don’t really have to do very much. In my official capacity as Class Historian, all I really do is sit around and suggest things every now and then, a dream of a job if there ever was one.
But it’s late and I’ve been going all day on very little in the way of sleep, and it has been one hell of a day, and much as I would like to write about it, I can’t. Not now.
We’ve agreed to cancel tomorrow morning’s shooting in the interest of group morale. I’m going to bed now, and I’ll try to get up tomorrow morning in time to chronicle today’s activities. Believe me, gang, I’m not a shirker. I recognize my responsibilities to you all.
When this picture is done I’m going to sling a movie camera over my shoulder and start walking. When I reach a place where people stare at me and ask me what the hell I’m carrying around, there shall I build my house.
— Thursday Morning
True to his word, the Valiant Screenwriter arose, showered, shaved, drank a cup of instant coffee, and did sit himself down at his Faithful Typewriter.
As you may have gathered, yesterday was a ball-breaker. It started off rotten when the Master of Ceremonies failed to make his appearance. It’s not a hard part, nor is it a very large part, but the cabaret scene is in trouble without it. We hired this son of a bitch because he gave us a fairly decent reading and he owned a tuxedo. We called the number he gave us and some girl emerged from a sound sleep long enough to tell us he was out of town for the week. May he be planted upside down in the ground like a turnip while maggots eat his brains, and may the moths do perverted things to his tuxedo. We had a whole contingent of backers and people from Dell and friends and friends of friends all assembled, and we were trying to decide who of their number could fill the breach, without much enthusiasm for our range of possibles, when Pluto, who had just come down to the set for the hell of it, came to the rescue. He asked if it might not be consistent to have him involved in the cabaret sequence, much as Madge is present at the preparations for the orgy. I said it would indeed be consistent, and he said would it not make eminent good sense were he to be the Master of Ceremonies.